Too corporate to fight for a free press

It just got a lot harder to make the case that any corporation should own a news operation. 

Late Tuesday night, Paramount, the parent company of CBS News, announced a multimillion-dollar agreement with President Donald Trump over a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris that aired in October, a month before the presidential election. Complaining about the show’s edit, Trump baselessly cried “election interference” by the top-rated news broadcast. Later that month, he sued Paramount for $20 billion in damages. On Tuesday, Paramount settled the case for $16 million, an amount that will go toward Trump’s legal fees and future presidential library. The agreed settlement amounts to .08 percent of his original claim. But the damage is priceless. 

Trump’s lawsuit was widely considered frivolous. News programs often edit interviews for length and clarity, and as the released transcript shows, Harris’ answers to host Bill Whitaker’s questions about what the U.S. could do to stop Israel’s war in Gaza from spinning out of control were hardly made to appear substantively better, as Trump has repeatedly complained. 

But Paramount, which is firstly and primarily an entertainment company, is seeking to merge with another corporation, Skydance, co-owned by longtime Trump pal Larry Ellison. It’s the reason why Shari Redstone — who, as the largest Paramount shareholder, will benefit handsomely from government approval of the merger — sought to simply pay Trump off rather than fight for a free press. And Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) made no bones about the fact that it was considering the lawsuit as part of its regulatory approval process for the planned $8.4 billion merger. 

Tuesday’s announcement was hardly surprising. Earlier this year, major law firms did the same, rushing to cut deals with Trump after he lawlessly targeted them for retribution. Then, some colleges and universities followed suit. Now the corporate media is fully capitulating, collectively forking over upwards of $65 million to Trump entities since the November election.

The following month, in the aftermath of Trump’s second shock election, ABC News, which is owned by Disney, set the precedent when it agreed to pay more than $15 million to Trump’s future library after anchor George Stephanopoulos reported that Trump was found liable for the “rape” of E. Jean Carroll. The next month, Facebook parent company Meta paid Trump $25 million to end a lawsuit over its decision to ban his accounts after the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot. In an earlier shift made to appease Trump, the social media giant also agreed to end fact-checking on its sites ahead of the 2024 election. In February, Elon Musk’s X reached a $10 million settlement with Trump for suspending his account following Jan. 6. And earlier this week, after dropping his federal lawsuit against famed pollster Ann Selzer and The Des Moines Register for publishing her pre-election Iowa poll that found him significantly trailing Kamala Harris, Trump refiled the case in state court. 

Trump’s suit against Paramount sought to punish CBS News under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, which is intended to protect customers from false advertising. In a court filing from just last week, the company called out Trump’s “meritless lawsuit” as an attempt “to evade bedrock First Amendment principles establishing that public officials like themselves cannot hold news organizations like CBS liable for the exercise of editorial judgment.”

On Wednesday at the company’s 2025 annual shareholder meeting, Paramount CEO George Cheeks offered a weak defense of the payout. “Companies often settle litigation to avoid the high and somewhat unpredictable cost of legal defense,” he said. 

As many have pointed out, this latest settlement will only embolden the president even further to continue his flurry of frivolous lawsuits against the press. Right-wing media, meanwhile, is using Paramount’s payment as proof of media malfeasance, suggesting the company settled a winnable case because it sought to avoid potentially damaging discovery during a court trial. Major Trump booster Sean Hannity, citing Fox News Digital, misleadingly reported that “the settlement could include an additional, mid-eight-figure sum earmarked for future ads and public service announcements aligned with conservative causes.” Notably, the settlement does not include CBS issuing an apology to Trump.

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Trump isn’t an honest negotiator. Paramount is foolish if its executives think this secures a green light from the FCC of their sale. And what becomes of CBS News’ reputation, and that of their flagship news magazine program?

The turmoil inside both “60 Minutes” and the network’s larger news division has been intense. In April, during what the New York Times characterized as an “emotional meeting,” longtime “60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens resigned after he said he was pressured to alter the program’s coverage of the Trump administration. CBS News President Wendy McMahon resigned from the company the following month amidst pressure from Trump after she alerted the public to the administration’s questionable actions. On Sunday, Oliver Darcy reported in his Status newsletter that current “60 Minutes” correspondents signed a letter pleading with Paramount executives to “put up a fierce and unrelenting fight” against Trump’s lawsuit. 

Reacting to the news on Wednesday, Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts suggested the settlement “sounds like bribery in plain sight” and called for a congressional investiation, adding that she’s working to author legislation “to rein in this kind of corruption.” The Freedom of the Press Foundation indicated that it planned to file a shareholder’s lawsuit, because, ironically, it is shareholders who hold favorable grounds to sue in our corporatist system, not the people dependent on freedom of the press. 

What’s clear, in any case, is that big corporations undoubtedly threaten journalistic independence. 

As it stands now, ABC News is owned by Disney, NBC News is owned by Universal and CNN is owned by Warner Bros. The Washington Post is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, while the Wall Street Journal and cable news giant Fox News are owned by Rupert Murdoch. Good luck bursting this billionaire bubble – let alone fending off another billionaire’s brazen attacks — with corporate-dominated media. Bezos, for example, infamously shelved a planned pre-election endorsement of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris by the Post’s editorial board last fall, and his space exploration company, BlueX, has spent millions lobbying for government contracts.

That’s how we got oversaturated coverage of Bezos’ $50 million celebrity-studded Venice wedding in a week when a Republican-led Congress rammed through one of the largest upwards redistributions of wealth in American history. When people fawn over billionaires, it feeds the frenzy as our freedoms get trampled.